Good Will Hunting can be viewed as a critique of the widespread internalization of the values of classism in the United States by the very persons who are most likely to be victimized by class warfare. The film tracks the transformation in consciousness of Will Hunting, a young man who has never had a break in life and who is on the point of acquiescing in underclass status. Indeed, he is on the point of selecting a path in life that dooms him to existence on the lower-class criminal fringe of society. The narrative follows his halting odyssey into an entirely new kind of life, as he discards, sometimes with bittersweet reluctance, what cannot serve that life. Meanwhile, the audience is exposed to the sharp class cleavages of American experience.
From one point of view, Good Will Hunting can be interpreted as an entirely predictable exercise in American sentiment. Yet the performances lend verisimilitude to the narrative. The situation of the central character is the plainest statement of the class-riven nature of American society. Will Hunting is constantly getting into petty trouble with the law, constantly before a judge, constantly having to justify himself, and continually nursing an "attitude problem." His job is the kind that members of the underclass routinely fill: janitor, cleaning up after students and teachers at an elite Boston university (MIT).
It turns out, of course, that he has repressed a childhood of abuse and that his defensiveness is actually an ego-defense in the psychological sense. Freud cites the psychopathology implicit when "the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly . . . subject to disturbances[,] and the boundaries of the ego are not constant" (Freud, 1961, p. 13). For Will Hunting, the boundary is askew, with Will's "attitude" an often unsuccessful attempt to manage the chaos. It lands Will in such trouble with the law t...